Posted
by
timothyon Thursday July 07, 2011 @03:31PM
from the division-of-labor-limited-by-extent-of-market dept.

A feature story in Mother Jones gives a fascinating inside look at what it's like to work in a Delhi call center. In this area alone, says the author, "100,000 call-center agents make their living selling vitamins to Britons or helping Americans troubleshoot their printers. I am almost certainly the only one who acquired his conversational skills accidentally — by being born in the United States." The slots at the call centers are limited and highly sought; the training is intense, and the infrastructure is poor.

"Truth is, 90 percent of the people there, you will find, they'll do the most stupid things, impulsive things. I know for a fact. At the same time, Americans are bighearted people, and the remaining 10 percent of them are smart. Bloody smart. That's why they rule the world."

When I stopped asking questions, Shail had one for me. "I have experienced some Americans—please don't mind—they don't like Indians. They act rude as soon as they come to know I am Indian. Why is this?" I stammered something about protectionism, but really I didn't know what to say.

Simply put, nobody likes communicating with people who are.. well... difficult to communicate with. It's bad enough trying to overcome a language barrier in general conversation. It's even worse when you're trying to communicate a technical problem or make a complicated request. I don't want to have to spell out my email 3x in phonetic alphabet. Sometimes I can't even tell if the person I'm talking to actually understands my problem because everything they say is scripted.

Plus -- as Louis CK has said -- I know the Indian on the line doesn't give a shit about me and my white people problems.

Simply put, nobody likes communicating with people who are.. well... difficult to communicate with. It's bad enough trying to overcome a language barrier in general conversation. It's even worse when you're trying to communicate a technical problem or make a complicated request. I don't want to have to spell out my email 3x in phonetic alphabet. Sometimes I can't even tell if the person I'm talking to actually understands my problem because everything they say is scripted.

Tell me about it. I hate calling tech support and getting people in Alabama.

Tell me about it. I hate calling tech support and getting people in Alabama.

People modded you Funny, but I have been there. Talking with somebody whose southern accent was so thick I couldn't understand them, and I'm from Oklahoma. The last thing I want is to call for help and end up speaking to Boomhauer.

I think Occam's razor has an even simpler explanation, all call centers anywhere are likely to fail at living up to the customer experience the user wants. They're pissed that the service is broken to begin with and troubleshooting is a long and tedious process and there might not be any immediate solutions either. Particularly many residential users are worse than useless at helping you resolve it, as well as extremely impatient because the problem wasn't solved ten minutes ago. I would think that getting

When I stopped asking questions, Shail had one for me. "I have experienced some Americans—please don't mind—they don't like Indians. They act rude as soon as they come to know I am Indian. Why is this?" I stammered something about protectionism, but really I didn't know what to say.

American consumers are watching companies abandon customer service and outsourcing these functions to overseas companies that employ call-takers that have no knowledge of the products they support, no ability to do any real troubleshooting, and no authority to give any help at all outside the script on their desk.

India isn't the cause of the problem; it's the symptom. When we call and talk to someone in India, we're not upset at India, we're upset at the company we're trying to do business with, which has let us down. Talking to someone in India is simply the indication that the company we're working with doesn't care about us as customers.

Quite often the people setting up accounts with us are outsourcing because the "girl who handles that" or "the lady at the front desk" is taking on additional responsibilities.

When they give us incomplete information or information that indicated that they really have no idea what kinds of procedures the "lady at the front desk" does to handle calls and schedule service (for example), they often given

I think a better explanation is that being connected to an Indian is proof of quasi-fraud on the part of the company we're dealing with. I mean, we bought the product in America from a company that represents itself in our language and culture. They gave us a support number they asserted would be our connection to that company. The we get connected to someone on a foreign continent and we realize they're using a fake name. So that's the catalyst for suddenly recognizing a whole series of lies.

My main frustration with the outsourcing "issue" isn't that I'm talking to someone from India. It's that I'm talking to someone from India that's pretending to be from America. It's really insulting to our intelligence and I'm not sure what they gain from it at this point. Now it's well known that there's a ton of outsourcing, so why do companies bother trying to hide it anymore?

The problem isn't really racism, but I think it's because it's a brutal reminder to the callers that the economy is still lousy and all these jobs are now outsourced and there's not even a remote hope that this will change. Add to that the fact that any call center call will be frustrating no matter who is on the other end; no one phones a call center because they're having a great day. Julia Roberts could be on the other end of the line but when she says "have you tried rebooting it?" I'm going to get ma

the same people who a few years ago aggressively waved the flag for those corporations and politicians who were most in favor of outsourcing American jobs overseas.
I have never met anyone other than a manager who was ever in favor of outsourcing overseas. It's bad for the economy, gives you a black eye in the eyes of employees and consumers, is at best only slightly less expensive in the near term , and is horrendously more expensive and damaging to the company in the long turn. Anyone who is lower than C

That's funny to me. I'm stoked when I get Mexico on the line. Sometimes I end up pressing 3 for spanish so I can get Mexico because they speak better english and handle problems better than the indian call centers.

No the use of American/English common names is to make you think they are from your home nation. They give groundings in your nations cultures/past-tense to help keep up the pretense. They do it because the people running these call centers know that people hate calling Indian call centers, if you read the article you would see that.

I went to secondary school with several Asian immigrants they all had standard English first names and kept their normal surname e.g. Alex Tse and Micheal Pan. They didn't ch

I deal with Indians in two different capacities. One is my professional environment where I communicate with outsourced teams and the other is my personal environment where I contact customer support on various services and products.

I never give them hell, because I realize that they are just trying to make a living, but the communication and cultural barriers are too wide for me. Some of our technical partners utilize Indian software developers and I have been talking to Indians for over a decade and to this day I still have trouble with their accents. Email is a little better, but either cultural differences or something else causes conversations to be circular in nature. I don't think they are intentionally dishonest, but they have an aversion to saying "no" and end up being vague and confusing.

Also, either the companies who hire the call centers or the call center management themselves need to stop having call center reps address themselves with American names. I am not thoroughly educated in Indian customs, but I doubt there really are that many people in India named Bob, Joe, Rick, Ann, Susan, and Jennifer. They aren't fooling anybody and it is insulting one's intelligence.

I am sure working in an Indian call center is hell, and I respect them for making a living, but I honestly wish I didn't have to deal with them.

Assuming it doesn't get overused, that actually sounds like a really useful communication tool. A lot of stress would be averted if you knew someone wasn't ignoring you, but rather had never actually heard you (or understood you).

Its not because they are trying to fool you into thinking you are talking with an American. The issue is lots of those names are really really hard to pronounce for native English speakers who have no experience with Hindi.

I have worked very close with lots of India developers, the ones who actually come here tend to American-ize their names rather than pick a new one like John. Punjababriu becomes Prabu for instance. The later I can say correctly the former it took him helping me many times to learn to say correctly. You know I felt really bad about it too. Nobody likes it when you get their name wrong. Most of us don't want to go around hurting the feelings of or insulting others; or suspecting that we might be. In this case he knew it was not a respect thing and that I was trying really hard to learn to correctly say his name, but still.

Really these call center folks are doing you a kindness by sparing you the embarrassment of having to try and repeat a name that is going to be hard for your say.

When I call customer support, I really don't care what the rep's name is. (Nor do I care to discuss how my day is going). I care about how efficiently my question is answered by the overall experience (which is ideally resovled before I have to speak to any human at all).

Does anybody care to know what a CS rep's name is? Does anybody believe that there is something to be gained by noting that they spoke to "Randy". These are huge operations -- no surnames?

Yes, you care about the name, 'cause when it goes wrong, you need to be able to call back and refer to "I talked to Suzy" - it once in a while does help.

FYI, my experience with India has been mixed - just like my experience with Americans. The company is more important to any pattern of behavior than nationality, in my experience. CVS/Caremark has been far and away the worst phone-related experience of my life (many, many calls). They have been consistently wretched, and always American as far as I could

The issue is lots of those names are really really hard to pronounce for native English speakers who have no experience with Hindi.
But that is easily solved by maintaining a facility in the country that you are supporting and hiring locals. Additionally, it makes people feel better about your company and more likely to buy your products.

My name is 2 syllables and everyone still gets it wrong. The good news when you're talking to an American of Indian descent is that we don't care how you pronounce our names. After years of correcting people and more years after having given up, as long as you don't consciously mess it up, it's fine.

So why not say something like "My name is Punjababriu but you may call me Prabu"? I would prefer an approach that doesn't sound so suspiciously like a really bad attempt to fool me. If that sounds too informal, just use the easier but not entirely fake name.

i am an indian, i live here and still i hesitate before calling tech support. the problem is that support people assume that i'm completely clueless. another reason is that some companies' call center people (eg, vodafone) speak only scripted lines, the conversation is never natural and gets awkward when i ask a question that is not on their database.however, some companies do it properly and their support is really helpful. for eg, when i call up the telephone/adsl help center, they give me a choice 'press

You pay your money and you get what you pay for. You want service from a company that pays its support staff $900 a year, then don't expect the same quality service as a company that pays its staff $20,000 a year (or more).

I could give fuck-all what the company that sold it to me pays their call-center employees. I want it to work. If that cuts into some fat plutocrat's viagra money, then fuck him for selling me something that can break.

Doesn't matter what the piece of equipment is. It's expensive, and when I need customer service on it I expect responsiveness and knowledge so that it can be put back into service in a way that makes me not pissed off that it stopped doing the things it was supposed to do.

Honestly, at 20k a year in the US you're not going to get college educated call center staff, whereas in India you can.
Which college? Barber? Or Clown?
We outsource to India. We were told that we are getting people with Master's degrees basically doing heads down keying. We have high school graduates working for us that make twice as much, but have 5 times the throughput and get it correct the first time. It is slowly sinking in to our senior management that we need to ditch the Indians and higher local h

if they didn't call my home, uninvited, at dinner time. I can deal with any call centre when it's my business (they're helping me. Thanks, guys). When they're trying to sell me something, uninvited on my home line I have no problems hanging up on them. My home is not their shop.

The Do Not Call registry also got rid of some spam calls for me, although it did not get rid of the worst culprits, politicians and charities, which represented about 95% of the spam calling that I received.
However, this is another example of where society has gone wrong. I should not have to go out of my way to stop someone that I don't want to talk to from calling me.
I think they should have to deposit $1 with my phone company, and it if turns out that I want to talk with them, they get their dollar bac

They do know American society than most Americans and their politicians:

"Truth is, 90 percent of the people there [in the US], you will find, they'll do the most stupid things, impulsive things. I know for a fact. At the same time, Americans are bighearted people, and the remaining 10 percent of them are smart. Bloody smart. That's why they rule the world."

They are qualified to rule us. We just need to outsource the Congress.

Perhaps, but you got a 1-800 number AND when you called it, you got an engineer ( more then likely a programmer on call center rotation ) that really knew the product inside and out and would talk to you for as long as it took to solve the problem and that could be formatting, printing, or their extremely powerful scripting language.

Just try calling Microsoft for help with Office, go ahead I will watch and laugh.

In mid-2009 we had to revive a Windows 2000 server (yes, two-thousand) that had about 2TB of inaccessible production data because of corrupt partition tables. The Indian engineers on the other end of MS support saved our ass by manually rebuilding those tables and they did it very well. Had they failed, several of us would have been refreshing our resumes. I'm personally not a fan of MS but when you've got a job to do, you do it.

The 500.00 was the cost of the software. As long as you stayed up to date, support was free! I looked at your link and it was just "call us". I wonder how much it costs or how big a customer you have to be to get help on that number?

I am sure I will get moded down for this, but "whateva"... (yes I am American)I am so tired of American IT workers bitching about Indian tech support. First off... It seems that most of the time, the American IT guy bitching about the support he is getting actually has no clue WTF he is talking about in the first place. Second... Why don't you shut your American-I-am-always-right mouth for one second and actually LISTEN. If you are too stupid to realize that your speaking with a person whose first language

This article and many other western publication paint the picture that BPOs are the only game in town for young Indians. Not true. Engineers are in very high demand, especially Civil, Mining and Mechanical engineers. College graduates with degrees in commerce or liberal arts also do well depending on the first job they take up. Jobs that service the local market are tougher but have an actual career path. But you won't get to work in a nice air-conditioned office, won't have a car to pick and drop you back and initial pay will be lower than a call center job. Several of my friends who started working for local banks and selling financial products to Indians started off with low pays and jobs that require a lot of enterprise and leg-work. Ten years later, most of them make more money that I do in silicon valley with a respectable 6 figure salary. People (kids really), who end up in BPO jobs get attracted by the initial high salary, party like culture on premises (free food, chicks, parties thrown to retain employees). So can't really blame capitalism for this mess. These young people can chose - start with a good pay and good work environment but boring job and no career path OR start low, work hard but have a viable career ten years down the line.

In India they teach via route memorization, and if it is not a solution that is memorized and requires analytical skill they are next to useless.

They need to teach deductive reasoning techniques. In the US we used to teach this, but now it is nothing but route memorization so they can pass the silly idiot federally mandated tests so the school employees can get their federal government cheese.

And we wonder why we are losing tech jobs t the third world. That and the whole "I am entitled to free crap with

I'm hard of hearing. I can barely understand people on the phone as it is with my hearing aid set to telecoil and it's volume up as high as it goes. Then you add those annoying "your call is important to us" announcements (what at 3:00 am?) machine noise, distorted on hold music due to crappy VOIP software (on their end of things, not mine) and after I wait nearly an hour and navigate your useless phone tree I'm supposed to shout at someone who doesn't understand my voice and whose accent is unintelligibl

The big problem with outsourced tech support tends to be that regardless of where it is situated they tend to get paid based on the number of calls they handle (at least for consumer services, for business products/services they tend to use better metrics). So they have no incentive in letting their employees fix problems (even if they can), just get customers off the line as quickly as possible.

This was often the case when I worked at Dell. If the hardware guys in India were past their quota of dollars in parts to send for the day they would hang up on customers. I worked in paid software support, so that wasn't usually something I saw unless I called on behalf of a customer to get something fixed. The last time that happened to me it resulted in me learning how to exchange a laptop myself by request of my superiors.

That said, a huge number of them really were useless. I got told to confim a part number with hardware support before transferring the lady who wanted it to spare parts. The guy on the other end took my description and part number and then came back with the number for a power cable! The Indians on my team hated these guys too, so it seemed to be partially a corporate culture problem (despite that being a Dell-owned facility) in addition to a regular accent/culture problem.

This is still the case, our local call center where my girlfriend is a quality specialist (yes they have them, they are just not listened too for the most part), they have only one contract for the whole building, and they are paid by buy how many calls they take, so its not just outsourced call center jobs. In my experience in working there for a very short time it is the number one complaint of the people working there, more then pay or schedule's or hours, because most people (probably 75%) genuinely wan

The weird thing was even though they nagged us about handle times they didn't do much about them. They let me get away with spending half a day fixing some people's machines. If I was the one selling a support contract on a call like that it made my close rate and resolution rate look awesome. They even let me fix stuff we weren't supposed to touch because hardware support had tried and ruined the person's week.

Of course they decided working like this was too expensive and moved our jobs to a centre in th

I used to buy only Dell computers, and was influential in getting three companies to switch all Dell, from 1991 until about 2002 (two of which are now publicly traded, and presumably still using Dell). The kind of demo I could do for the higher level decision makers was fun. Got a stupid Microsoft PowerPoint question? Ever try to get it answered from Microsoft? Yeah... right. I could call Dell support about any stupid Windows question, and I'd get a very knowledgeable guy on the other end who would tak

Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless. Not that I fault the individual workers - I'm sure it's a situation much like we have here in the US, where these poor souls are limited by asinine corporate playbooks, and thus, provide no valuable service to customers.

At least you understand that it's not their location or nationality that makes them useless, it's that they aren't really tech support people - they are consumer relations people. All they know how to do is follow their troubleshooting script, they've likely never used or have even seen the product you're having trouble with. But it's not like a company can afford to let you talk to a product engineer when your $150 Blu Ray player stops working.

The thing that gets me is that companies will spend lots of money putting together troubleshooting scripts and a knowledgebase that the call center workers can use, but they don't make that same information available to the public through their website, which would likely keep me from having to call tech support in the first place.

All they know how to do is follow their troubleshooting script, they've likely never used or have even seen the product you're having trouble with.

I can only speak for the two call centers I worked at right out of college (and the two teams I was on) but that's not always true. We knew the products and services we supported inside out, it was just that we often weren't allowed to fix problems (sometimes we were locked out of systems, other times it was just that they would check the logs to make sure people didn't make certain changes to connections).

When talking to others who have worked in tech support I've found that this is surprisingly often the case, they knew a lot more than they were allowed to let the customer know. The problem is of course that there's often no way around this, the guy knows he needs to keep his call times down and that the boss will be really pissed if he actually turns on interleave on your DSL connection, he must go through the script and then escalate it to a 3rd line tech who opens up the same tool the 1st line guy used and clicks the "interleave" checkbox. Have fun waiting two to three business days for that to happen...

^^^ This. I've seen people get fired for even attempting to use critical thinking skills, because when the numbers and the procedures are the only thing that matter, critical thinking is a liability, both in the legal sense and the simple fact that it begins to break all of the nifty quality control metrics.

There's a reason call centers tend to be established in small college towns and similar places, lots of young people with a decent education but not a lot of jobs available. That's not to say there are no jobs, just that someone straight out of college can't exactly pick and choose, so it's easy for people to think "Oh, I'll just do tech support/customer service for a while until I find a real job..." and then end up working there for two or three years before they're so broken psychologically that they jus

I worked at a call center for a while and was told by my supervisor that my call times were too high and I needed to hose-and-close more people. (Translation: Lie to them and get them to do something they can't possibly stay on the phone for.) "Hose-and-close" was his words, BTW.

This was printer support for HP. The contractor (EDS) was paid per call, so hose-and-close was a profit generator, and at 23 minutes per call instead of the maximum 20, I wasn't generating enough profit.

They are trained to speak English, and as far as possible in an accent that people from the United States will be comfortable with. I am aware this often doesn't work well, but when you consider that most of the employees are people from schools that are worse than the toughest public schools in US, you might understand that it's not easy for them to sound convincing. Hence, the intensive training.

I myself have close friends (who are quite brilliant technically in comparison to many undergrads that I have m

Your first one - "Can I know" or "May I know" instead of "Can you tell me" or "What is" construction when asking for the problem description, model/serial number, or even your name. I get someone on the line who opens up that way, they're likely in either India or Malaysia (which is where Dell now puts their corporate call centers after the client uproar when they tried to ship corporate support to India).

Your first one - "Can I know" or "May I know" instead of "Can you tell me" or "What is"

There are other ones you learn to listen for quickly. An out-of-place conjugation here, an oddly colloquial phrase there... it adds up quickly.

I'm sure accent is more a part of it. I set up call scripts, and I'll get clients who will insist on any of those. If the agent says something else (because usually what the client wrote is awkward anyway since most clients don't know how to put themselves in the shoes of someone talking on the phone for some reason) we'll get an email back that says "This study I have here says blablabla so I"m going off service if your agents won't read my awkward phrasing verbatim."

In what? Choosing a fake name? Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless.

Actually, one of the things that some Indian call center workers have been starting to revolt against is choosing American-sounding fake names for themselves. The workers of the opinion "My name is Rakesh, and I shouldn't be ashamed of that fact. Plus, they'll know I'm from India the moment I open my mouth, why try to hide it?" And management has occasionally gone along with that.

Tech support, outsourced or not, done on the cheap, will get shoddy results. Tech support will get done on the cheap (or not at a

Company I used to work for had an interesting strategy for that. you could buy the product with or without a tech support contract. The product was actually fairly cheap (comparatively speaking to competitors in the market) and the company made the bulk of it's money in the support contracts. Why did so many clients purchase the "costs you an arm and a leg" contracts?

A. The software was broken. Rapid releases and feature bloat means that it hadn't been stable since version 7, and they were several revisions

nope, Wife still works for the company, and while she hates every minute of it, and I don't want to jeopardize her job nonetheless. It shouldn't surprise you to know that they have a pretty strict "do not talk about us in social media or on the web" policy. While it obviously no longer applies to me, it may still transitively apply to her.

Rakesh is absolutely right. Part of the resentment of Indian call centers is that they even answer the phone with a lie and treat the caller like the dumbest person on Earth by doing a fairly poor job of pretending to be American. I would prefer the truthful approach.

Occasionally, I hear the claim that it's just that some Indian names might be "hard" for Americans to pronounce. Fine and dandy, let them tell me their real names and suggest a short nickname if I prefer.

Call Center jobs in the United States are considered very low end jobs with a high turn over, because most Americans even in this economic situation can get better jobs. Hence why they go to India or other countries, mostly because it is cheaper, but also because it is considered a good job if you can take it there so you get a better work from there.The problem isn't that jobs are being outsourced, or even the Visas. It is that The United States lately has seemed to lag in Creating new types of jobs.

Salaries are going up, eventually, they will reach true market value. You and I may suffer out in the west, however by the time next generation comes along, 5$/hr will seem more palatable to Americans at the same time as Indians would have moved to $5/hr. There would be a balance at some point. Already happening on the IT industry side, Avg. Indian Developer is a lot more costly than he was 10 years ago, and the costs are rising.

We first addressed this popular theme in 2004, when we reported on a John Kerry campaign ad in which he blamed President George W. Bush for providing tax incentives to companies “outsourcing” jobs overseas. At the time we found that such tax breaks, which do exist, pre-dated the Bush administration and that even Democratic-leaning economists did not support the idea that changing the corporate tax code would end the movement of jobs overseas.

Could you provide some sort of source for your statement, then? I'd love to be able to throw that statistic around, but I'm not willing to do it unless I can defend it properly.

I went looking, but I can't find any breakdown of the tax cuts. It wasn't "incentives," it was a cut of a tax from 35% to something like 6%, and it was in that same asinine package that handed every American $300 in "rebate" that they then had to pay back in tax. Total scam.